This blog revolves around the dual concepts of “Reality” and “Illusion”. In the post 9/11 world it can be difficult to distinguish between reality and illusion as facts are altered and new pseudo-realities are created. In 2002 a White House aide said: “We’re an empire now and when we act we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”
There is also the ultimate Reality - alluded to in the very first post of this blog.

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Monday, July 3, 2017

This is a continuation of the previous blog dated 19 May. That blog was concerned with how the Christian religion and scripture originated, which you can read here: The OriginsThis blog is concerned with the conflicting beliefs espoused by people who eventually emerged victorious over fellow Christians holding different views from their own. What Jesus actually said or preached is now lost in mists of antiquity, the NT having become a repository of the victors' inconsistent views.

The Messiah or a Reforming Prophet?

Paul’s writings
pre-date the four Gospels. Paul wrote some 40-50 yeas after Jesus’ death while
the four Gospels appeared during the succeeding 50 years, written by scribes
who relied on oral traditions. Paul’s views are at odds with the accounts in
the Gospels as well as in the book of Acts, written by the author of the Gospel
of Luke. Paul introduced the splendid idea of Jesus being offered up by God as
a sacrifice for the sins committed by others! Apparently, people never
questioned the injustice and gullibility inherent in this claim of vicarious
sacrifice. People were mesmerised by the idea that a mere belief in Jesus, the
crucified Messiah, was enough to "save" them and it also freed them of the need to follow
Jewish Law. At a stroke, the Jewish Law became irrelevant: the only way to wash
away your sins was through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus!

The scribe who wrote the
Gospel of Matthew some 25-30 years after Paul, flatly contradicted him by
asserting that the followers of Jesus needed to keep the Jewish Law!

“Do not think that I
have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish but to
fulfil. ……….Therefore whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments
………. Will be called least in the kingdom of heaven …….. For I tell you , unless
your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never
enter the Kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:17-20).

Paul, however, was
quite clear that whoever followed this alleged exhortation of Jesus was in danger
of losing his/her "salvation". What one book of the NT lays down in strong terms
is contradicted equally strongly in another book! The fact that both views exist in the same scripture makes a mockery of the NT: if one part of the scripture is correct then another part cannot be. If there is a devout Christian who believes in both Paul and Matthew simultaneously then he/she needs to have his/her sanity tested.

To the early Christians known as the Ebionites, Paul was the arch-enemy with his convoluted ideas of Jesus’ death and resurrection: "salvation" came only from Jesus’s death. Put simply, Paul transformed the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus. The Pauline dogma was also opposed by Jesus' brother James, leader of the Church in Jerusalem, who accepted Jesus as a reforming Prophet sent to regenerate the moribund Jewish religion. Within a century, however, the followers of
Jesus had turned Christianity into a distinct anti-Jewish religion.Paul’s anti-Jewish
stance was mild compared to the views expressed in various Gospels which did
not make it into the canon authorised by Emperor Constantine. Even the
canonical Gospel of John has Jesus declare the Jews to be the “children of the
Devil” (John 8:42-44).

The conflicting Gospels

It is thought that
Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 CE. Both Matthew and
Luke, writing 15-20 years later, used Mark as one of their sources, hence these
three are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels. This is the reason why almost
all of Mark’s parables and stories can be found in Matthew or Luke, though some
of them were changed to emphasise certain points that Matthew or Luke thought
important. For example, Jesus’ death is described differently in Mark and Luke.
In Mark he is a terrified man led to his death (“My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me”) but in Luke he is a fearless, benevolent and sagacious man
unconcerned about his own impending death (“Father, forgive them, for they know
not what they are doing”).

If Mark is to be
believed, Jesus had already announced the end of evil times and the onset of Kingdom of
God: “The time has been fulfilled; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and
believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). Two thousand years later we still await
the establishment of that kingdom of truth, peace and justice by the “Son of
Man” even though, according to Mark, Jesus blurted out: “Truly I tell you, some
of those standing here will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God
having come in power” (Mark 9:1). [Apparently, “Son of Man” is a reference to
the second appearance of Jesus on earth after he has died and is resurrected
and becomes, in some sense, “Son of God” as well!]

John’s Gospel, written
much later than the other three, is quite different from the Synoptic Gospels.
There is no mention of the virgin birth or any details of Jesus’s early life.
This Gospel wrestles with the theological issues which sharply divided the
Christian communities a hundred years after Jesus’s death. It talks about the
mystical Word of God, that existed in the very beginning, was itself God and
through it God created the universe, and eventually became a human being,
namely, Jesus [“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his
glory” (1:14)]. The miracles Jesus performs in John are referred to as “Signs”
of one come down from heaven to give eternal life to those who believe in him.
This is reinforced with many “I am” sayings attributed to Jesus: “I am the
bread of life”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the resurrection and the
life”, etc. Unlike the parables in Mark, we are assailed with long speeches by
Jesus!

The idea of a Kingdom
of God on earth is an alien concept in John! To John “Kingdom of God” exists in
“heaven”, not on earth, and believers in Jesus will reside there with God for
ever; others will be condemned. No mention here of the “Son of Man” to
establish God’s Kingdom on earth! John’s Gospel was written towards the end of
the first century CE, by which time the entire generation addressed by Jesus
had died without witnessing Jesus’ prophecy of Kingdom of God come true! So,
what does the anonymous scribe of the Gospel of John does? Easy. He creates a
Kingdom of God in heaven, not on earth! Is it possible to retain one’s sanity
and still be able to make sense of John’s convoluted theology?

The early Christians,
who had access only to Mark’s Gospel, would have known nothing about the
unusual birth of Jesus, being born of a virgin, or that he existed before his
appearance on earth. With the appearance of Matthew’s Gospel many years later,
the Christian dogma expanded to include the idea of Jesus’ mother being a
virgin. Then, with Luke, Jesus also acquired the status of “Son of God”, who is
vaguely of divine origin, his mother having been impregnated with The Holy
Spirit. (Luke 1:35) explains what Mary learnt from the angel Gabriel: “The Holy
Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you;
therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God”.
At this stage in the development of Christian dogma, Jesus was created when he
was born. The idea of him having existed before his earthly life came later
with John.

The Divinity of Jesus
and the dogma of Trinity

While the Old
Testament is all about the Jewish Prophets, the New Testament revolves around a
single controversial personality. Until you get to the Gospel of John, Jesus is
referred to as a “son” in much the same way that the Old Testament prophets
are, that is, as someone close to God. I have lost count of the number of
“sons”, “begotten sons” and “firstborns” mentioned in the OT.

One of the earliest
Christian sects, the Ebionites, were quite clear on the matter of divinity:
since there can be only One God, Christ is not God. For Christ to be God, there
had to be two gods: Jesus was a human Messiah, adopted by God to be his “son”,
but he was a man from first to last, not a divine being.

Then there was another
early sect, followers of Marcion, who believed in two Gods, the wrathful God of
the OT and the God of Jesus, the God of love and mercy. Still others believed
in multiple divine beings and they had no difficulty in accepting Jesus as
divine.

Over the succeeding
300 years, Chiristianity evolved, rejecting much of the early dogma as
heretical. The essential dilemma was: can Christianity remain a monotheistic
religion while accepting Jesus as a deity? Eventually, the dogma of Trinity was
invented and all opposing views were declared heretical. Tertullian, a noted
heresy hunter, declared some 200 years after Jesus’s death:

“The Father is one,
and the Son is one, and the Spirit is one …. they are distinct from one another
…. The Father is not the same as the Son, since they differ one from the other
in the mode of their being.” Having established that the three are distinct,
Tertullian then declares: “they are not different in substance though they are
different personalities”. That, in a nutshell, is the dogma of the Unity of the
Trinity: All three are God manifested in three different personalities!

Tertullian’s convoluted
arguments were debated and refined over the following hundred years as people
wrestled with the nature of the relationship between Father and Son. In the
fourth century the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and set
about unifying the religion, which could then be used to unify his fractured
empire. In 325 CE the famous Council of Nicaea was held, attended by the most
important bishops and priests in the empire, where the final form of the Christian
religion in the Roman empire was at last established, with its central dogma of
Trinity:

All threepersons in the Godhead are eternal beings
and they had always existed. They are three but they are One because they are
of the same substance!

All those mind-bending
arguments are now forgotten, pious Christians quietly accept the dogma of
Trinity spun by the theologians, some 200-300 years after the death of Jesus.

Does the New Testament
support the dogma of Trinity?

There does not seem to
be an explicit statement of Trinity in the NT, not even in the Gospel of John
where Jesus is clearly referred to as being divine. The later Christians found
such exclusion from their scriptures unnerving. Ehrman says that a specific
reference to the Trinity was accordingly inserted ( John 5:7-8):"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these are one.And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one."Make of it what you will!

Ehrman has
written a separate book about changes made to the Bible in the first 300 years
after Jesus: “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and
Why”.

Conclusion

Ehrman: “Jesus’s
divinity was part of John’s theology, not a part of Jesus’s own teaching".

Although the
Christians of Rome won in the end, insisting their beliefs to be ‘orthodox’, it was not the
original form of religion conveyed by Jesus and his apostles. The 4th
century Nicene Creed claimed Jesus to be “fully God and fully man”, and also
that he was “begotten not made, of one substance with the Father”. Neither claim
was made by the disciples or apostles of Jesus! Such obtuse theology made its
appearance a hundred years or more after the death of Jesus.

There have been
numerous archaeological discoveries, comprising ancient scrolls dating back to
the first 200 years CE. None of these support the view considered “orthodox” by
the established church and accepted without question by a majority of
Christians. Those discoveries are simply “heretical” compared to the “orthodox”
dogma. Texts in favour of “orthodox” dogma have never been found!

Jesus is supposed to
have died, or crucified according to orthodox belief, around 30 CE.

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Coming from the East and living in the West, I now belong to neither. Everywhere I have observed so much intolerance and an inability to understand each other's point of view that I have come to consider 'nationalism' as an evil. I perceive divisions of East and West as artificial because they create needless strife and intolerance in the world. The whole human race ought to live in harmony, sharing knowledge and experiences while avoiding harmful nationalism. Knowledge and wisdom, whether of the East or the West, are my heritage as a human being.
As a ‘citizen of the world’ I see myself as a tolerant Muslim in accordance with Quranic precepts. I have learnt much from exposure to western knowledge and culture, which has - surprisingly? - strengthened my own roots in Pakistani culture and Urdu, the language of Iqbal and Ghalib.
On Twitter: @RealandIllusory